Aeden lifted a cage from the row he’d been looking at and carried it over to the hood. It was only when he settled the cage down alongside ours, and I saw the newborn litter inside it, that it hit me that something was wrong. Before I could process his intentions, Aeden swapped the cage labels so that the card in the metal holder of our cage no longer read apell and doherty, but doherty and meltzer.
“What are you doing, Aeden?” I asked.
He switched the hood lights back off. In the darkness I could see him moving away from me, with one cage in each hand. He carried them over to the rack he’d been standing next to and slid them into transposed slots, matching their fake labels. “If Justin sends David out here to look for them he’ll take the wrong mice.” He rolled the rack back against the wall and started toward the door, empty-handed.
“This is unheard of.” I wheeled the rack away from the wall and pulled out our mislabeled cage. Something caught my foot and I tripped, nearly letting go of the cage. Holding on to it, I staggered toward the door to find Aeden standing against it, blocking my way out. He was gazing at me in a tired way, as if my intentions were absurd.
“If you take them out you’ll never be able to return them,” he said.
“You agreed to analyze them, Aeden.”
He shook his head. “I never said I would.”
“I won’t let you do this.”
“What won’t you let me do, Emily, save our only litter from the pompous asshole who calls himself a lab head? Look, I’ve never done something like this, but I’m doing it now for your sake.”
I shut my eyes.
“You can sacrifice them if you want,” Aeden continued. “If you’re so desperate to analyze them, I won’t stop you, but I’ll let you in on a secret—if the results are unclear, we won’t be able to publish them. Not only that, but we will have to cross the founders again and wait for the next litter, and that could take months.”
Outside, along the path of elms leading from the Animal Facility to our research building, rain pattered on our heads, and on the empty cart in front of us. We deposited the cart in the lab and walked back out. It was close to midnight and no one was around, not even David. The hallway was weakly lit, the air depressingly heavy with the self-scheming drone of machines. On the drizzling sidewalk to our dorms I found myself walking several steps ahead of Aeden, refusing the cover of his umbrella and shaking my wet hair at his suggestion that we pick up our conversation of earlier, the one we’d left unfinished in the street.
I slept in my own bed that night, and the night after that, and it was a while before I was able to talk to Aeden; a while before I was able to shake off the feeling that in not analyzing our mice, in returning the cage to the rack with my own two hands, something had been irredeemably altered. Steered off track, like those neurons in Craig’s paper.
A week later we were in room 310 again, checking on our litter, when Aeden broke the news to me. “I have a job offer,” he said. He’d gone to Cambridge for the interview and returned the next day looking triumphant.
A loud air was circulating inside the hood, and I pretended not to hear him. In the hoods it was possible to do that. Words got lost in the windswept air all the time. But he knew I’d heard. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked.
“Congratulations,” I offered.
One of the pups from the litter roamed the palm of his hand, eyes shut, tail between his legs, his fur shining in the light like tree bark. Within a week they had grown coats. Another three weeks and they would be old enough to analyze. Three weeks, I thought. In only three weeks we would have results, and if they were positive I believed Aeden would decide to stay in the lab.
He released the chirping mouse back inside the cage and covered it with the grid and the plastic lid. The card on the metal holder now read apell and doherty. Justin had sent me an email threatening to analyze the pups himself, but the litter of mice in the cage with our name was untouched after ten days, so we’d swapped back the labels.
“Nothing too fancy,” Aeden said. “Space is a little tight and resources are limited but at least I’ll be able to choose what to work on, as long as it has to do with neuron growth and regeneration. I’ll also have an experienced technician at hand, and a real salary, for the first time in my life. Not a bad package?”
“Decent,” I said, though I hadn’t intended to say this, or anything else about Neurogen.
“I hope more than just decent. I said yes to them.”
I looked at him then. “You said yes?”
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it, Emily, but you keep avoiding the subject.”
I was no longer standing with him at the hood, but moving away. Somewhere between his mention of Neurogen and the realization that he was seriously intent on leaving, I’d unconsciously started walking toward the door.
“Is it so terrible of me to want out?” Aeden asked behind me.
“No. I think it’s great,” I answered, hurrying out of the room.
He followed me outside. “You don’t really mean that.”
“I do,” I said. “I think it’s very wise of you to want to give up on the project and everything you’ve been working toward for the last four years of your life to go bury yourself in some obscure start-up company in the middle of nowhere.”
“What would you like me to do?” Aeden said, catching up to me. “Stay in the asshole’s lab forever?”
“Stop calling him that,” I said angrily. “Whoever Justin is, he deserves to be treated with respect.”
It was early in the morning, the time of day when there are more workers in an animal facility than there are investigators. I couldn’t see them, the men in scrubs and face masks who tended to the needs of the thousands of mice on our floor: I could only make out the music they listened to in the inner hallway running parallel to the one Aeden and I were moving through, and it may as well have been music from another planet, it felt so foreign.
I had nearly reached the exit door when Aeden stepped ahead of me, in front of the silver handle. I turned from the door, with the idea of running to the elevators at the end of the floor, but he caught hold of my arm. “What do you want me to do, Emily?”
“Clearly it doesn’t matter what I want,” I said, pulling my arm from his grasp. “You’ve already made plans for yourself.”
“Come with me.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t have to be Neurogen, or even Cambridge,” Aeden said. “I’ll go anywhere else, as long as we’re together.”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t serious, but he was. There was something almost humbling in his smile, something that made me realize he’d been turning over the idea in his head for a while.
“I’m not leaving the lab, Aeden.” What I told him next surprised me, and it also didn’t. “I will never abandon this project.”
A look of hurt rushed to his face and lingered on for several moments, and then he was gone. Before I could retract my words he’d swung the door open and walked out into the staircase and I was alone in the hallway. I tried to picture myself opening the door and running after him down the stairs, but couldn’t. So I remained where I was, staring at the place where Aeden had stood and listening to his footsteps recede, until the only sound that I could hear, like a distant heart murmur, was that of the music on the floor.
Chapter 23
After what happened that morning, Aeden began spending more time at his desk, surfing the Neurogen website and reading every paper on neuron growth and regeneration he could get his hands on. He spoke to me only when necessary, and when he looked at me from his desk, or while we made our way along the path of elms to the Animal Facility, there was always a question in his eyes, and it seemed to have little to do with the project or the mice or whatever it was I was inevitably talking about, and everything to do with what I had told him that morning.
More and more often I found myself alone with my thoughts on the terrace of our dorm buildin
g, where old-timers in the university—among them Aeden—had watched the Twin Towers crumble. On the bleakest of days, with the southernmost tip of the island a gray spot in the distance, the chimera often came to mind. Not the spotted male on whose progeny the experiment hinged, but what Rose, with her discerning eyes, had said about unrealizable dreams.
I kept dwelling on it—what she had told me—because of how I felt, knowing that Aeden would be leaving the lab after we analyzed the litter, but mainly because of what happened a few days later, after that morning, and could have been avoided had he and I been together as a couple.
I already mentioned that in the spring of that year, around the time Aeden and I began working in the tissue culture room, a new graduate student from Boston by the name of Ginny Wu came to work in the lab, and that she was given what had formerly been my bay in the main room, and wore too much perfume.
Since those days in the tissue culture room, half a year had passed, and in all those months neither Aeden nor I had ever approached or said to Ginny more than what people working in the same lab usually say to each other: how’s it going, it’s muggy out there, I saw a package for you in the cold room, the lecture is about to start, have a good night, you too.
I had often seen her in the conference room, having lunch with the other graduate students, and after lunch, after everyone had gone back to work, sitting alone at the table skimming the New York Times with her willowy fingers and a downcast, self-conscious sort of smile. I’m saying this because, as I remember it, six months had gone by and I’d hardly ever seen her working. In the beginning, her first month or two in the lab, she could be seen following David around in a lab coat, learning the ropes from him and ambling into people’s bays with a notepad and pen, but as the months progressed she seemed to have stopped trying. More often than not I saw her sitting idle in the conference room, or sneaking out of the lab before sundown with the robin’s-egg-blue case in which I imagined her oboe lay nestled, wrapped in layers of felt.
It took me a while to realize that the reason Ginny hadn’t really started working on anything didn’t have to do with laziness or indifference, but with her inability to find a promising research project in a lab where such projects were already taken. With time it became obvious to me that she had no special skills, nothing that would have enabled her to carve out a niche for herself, and that Justin had probably taken her in on the basis of some glowing recommendation and because she was a Harvard graduate who spoke Mandarin fluently and played for a small and well-regarded chamber ensemble that gave benefit concerts throughout the city, including at the lecture hall at AUSR.
That is how I saw her situation, and from the little I came to learn about her, my impressions were more or less accurate. Being her senior in the lab, and sensing how lost she was, I supposed that I could have made more of an effort to be nice to her, taken her under my wing and found something for her to do while she figured things out for herself. But I was caught up with the project, and there was also what Aeden had told me about the guys in the lab liking Ginny, and my supposition that he did too, whether or not he would admit to it. And also, though I hated to acknowledge it, I felt threatened by her and didn’t want to feel more ridiculous and mean-spirited about it than I already did. So I never offered to help.
But then neither did Aeden. As a general rule we kept our distance from her, and I would probably have little or no recollection of Ginny today had it not been for all the scientific discussions her perfume inspired between Aeden and me. But also, had she not walked into our bay one morning during this period when Aeden and I were not really talking.
We had returned from room 310, and I was anxious to get back to work on a human gene I’d recently come across, in a new DNA database, whose sequence bore a faint resemblance to that of the pathfinder gene. I remember my screen lit up with the sequence at the same time that I registered a disturbing smell, and I looked up to find Ginny standing there in front of me with her notepad and pen.
She made to smile, but probably seeing that I wasn’t about to do the same, quickly aborted the effort. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother at all,” I said flatly. She was wearing an interesting sweater, tissue white with a bright yellow lemon in the middle. It looked like a still life painting.
“Justin told me you knocked out a gene. I’d appreciate it if you could give me some pointers about the procedure.”
I was surprised she hadn’t gone straight to Aeden with the request, and then realized Justin had probably neglected to tell her who had engineered the mutation. I glanced at Aeden, but he hadn’t looked away from his screen, and I assumed he had no interest in helping Ginny either. “Do you mind if we talk later?” I said, not giving her a specific time or place.
“Not a problem,” Ginny said, and with a cheerful smile she trailed off, out of our bay and back into hers.
“You could have been more forthcoming, Emily,” Aeden said behind me, as soon as Ginny was gone. “The poor girl doesn’t know where she’s standing.”
I wanted to let the matter die, but for some reason didn’t. “So could you, Aeden. You’re the expert here, after all, not me.”
And that is how it all began.
Later that afternoon, on my way to the restroom, I saw them in the conference room. Ginny’s notepad was open on the table and she held her pen in her hand, but she wasn’t taking notes. She was nodding at Aeden, slowly, with a reined-in sort of enthusiasm that led me to understand they weren’t discussing science. I wondered who had sought out whom, and told myself it didn’t matter; soon enough Aeden would be done talking to her.
I had returned to my desk when Ginny walked hurriedly past me and disappeared into her bay, emerging shortly thereafter with her blue leather case. Not more than a minute passed before a nasal sound emerged from the depths of the hallway, raspy and broken at first and then increasingly fluid, gathering momentum and flooding every nook and cranny of the room with a magnanimous warmth so alien to the lab it was impossible to ignore.
Within moments the entire lab had flocked to the conference room, including Justin, who rarely left his office for anything. From where I stood I could see the bronze tail end of Ginny’s oboe, and her fingers moving up and down, and I could see Aeden. He was sitting at the edge of his seat, with his back to the whiteboard, and the arresting smile in his eyes as he watched her play struck a deep, sad chord in me.
After an interminable eight minutes or so, Ginny lowered her oboe and curtsyed, a genuine bow, and smiled with a sleepy face as if she were stepping out of a dream and only just noticing us. In the midst of all the commotion and applause I heard Aeden ask her what she’d played, but her answer was lost to me across the sultry air.
Chapter 24
For a while, after that afternoon, I willed myself not to think about Ginny. People didn’t just strike up a friendship after their first conversation, but as the days passed and I saw Aeden with her more often, it felt almost inevitable that they had. I caught a glimpse of them in the cafeteria one day, conversing at a corner table over their trays of food, and I began to bring sandwiches from home again. I knew that Aeden wasn’t with her in that way, that he wasn’t seriously involved with Ginny, and yet I couldn’t help but ask myself what this unlikely and unforeseen relationship between them was based on: their love of music, the novelty of their diverse backgrounds, the fact that Aeden was able to easily provide the help and guidance she obviously needed in the lab?
The days Ginny left the lab early with her instrument case, Aeden walked her dog—an old bloodhound with sad brown eyes whose existence I’d previously been unaware of. A smell of earth would come rolling like moist vapor through the open door of the lab, and before I could blink the dog would be standing in front of me with a yellow tennis ball clutched in his mouth, Aeden trailing behind with the leash.
For some reason the dog always came straight to me. Trembling, he would drop the ball into my hand and fix his brown eyes on mi
ne with nostalgia, as if on the lookout for something. “Hi there,” I’d say, patting the soft crown of his head, and the dog would start to whine.
“Cut it out, Smokey,” Aeden would say to him. And what inevitably brought a smile to my face: “Can’t you see people are trying to work around here?”
The dog would shoot him an uncomprehending look and slump down on the floor, next to me, and there he would remain, blowing hot air onto my legs until Aeden finished doing whatever he’d come to the lab to do, which short of checking his emails or clicking icons on the Neurogen website was nothing. His late afternoon visits to the main room with Smokey clearly had something to do with me, and though we were hardly on speaking terms at this point, they were still somehow good moments. The only worthwhile moments I recall of that period in the lab, leading up to the analysis of our mice.
It was during one of those lazy afternoons, sitting back-to-back at our desks, the dog curled at my feet, that Aeden brought up the idea of taking the project with me. I’d been unduly examining the sequence alignment on my screen, searching for homologues of the pathfinder gene, when I heard him swivel his chair around, and felt his eyes on me. I didn’t turn around, but he said, “Nothing is going on between Ginny and me, Emily. I realize you probably find that hard to believe, but it’s the truth. She and I are just friends.”
“I’m relieved to hear that,” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to be bored out of your mind, though I’m sure your mother would approve of Ginny.”
Aeden was sniffling behind me—his way of laughing when I was being ironic. Then he said, “You wouldn’t have to abandon the project, Emily. You could take it with you to another lab, maybe even your own, and you could build your own DNA database, and keep searching for gene relatives. After we analyze the mice and the paper is written, nothing forces you to stay here anymore.”
The DNA of You and Me Page 14